The New Premium iPhone Will Almost Certainly Start at $1,000

A New York Times report suggests that pricing has been set at $999 for what’s being called the iPhone 8.

Apple rarely surprises anymore — after years of smooth sailing, the ship is getting leaky. It’s been like that for years now, but it’s been even more noticeable in the run up to this year’s introduction of a premium model for the 10th anniversary of the iPhone. Some of the damage has even been self-inflicted — most of the hardware rumors regarding the large display and iris scanning were all but confirmed when Apple accidentally made HomePod firmware public.

The only rumors about the phone that remained unsubstantiated were those related to the price tag. We did see some good speculation, though, with a convincing argument made for Apple pushing the premium model up past $1,000, leaving the iPhone 7S and 7S Plus to the mainstream. This week, in an iPhone retrospective piece, the New York Times may have given us as close to confirmation as we’re going to get.

The piece cites sources who have been briefed about the upcoming iPhone as saying the premium iPhone will cost $999. We’d assume that’s a starting price, and that models with higher storage capacities will cost more as usual. Then again, that might not necessarily be the case. Apple might simply release one model with a ton of storage to drive home the fact that this premium iPhone really is the best of the best — if that’s the case, $1,000 is actually a little bit cheaper than we expected.

That’s still a ton of money for a phone, and in the end, it still will be just a phone — it’s not likely to have any longer of a lifespan than any other iPhone. But, it is the 10th anniversary of the iPhone, and for Apple adherents, it is almost certainly going to be the very best phone available. That could make ponying up a few hundred dollars more an attractive proposition for a lot of iPhone owners.